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Lynching

Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Outrage over the Frazier Baker Murder

By Trichita M. Chestnut

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so. The awful death-toll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling, not only because, of the lives it takes, [and] the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of the weak race. The Afro-American is not a bestial race. --Ida B.Wells, preface to Southern Horror

I n 1898 the Department of Justice was bombarded with letters concerning a recent lynching in South Carolina.The postmaster of Lake City, Frazier Baker, and his nearly two-year-old daughter Julia had been killed by a mob in the early hours of February 22.Two of the letters were from Ida B. Wells-Barnett--journalist, author, public speaker, and civil rights activist--who received national and international attention for her efforts to expose, educate, and inform the public on the evils and truths of lynching.

Lynching remains one of the most disturbing and least understood atrocities in American history. Between 1880 and 1941, roughly 4,179 persons were victims of lynch mobs in the United States. African American men, women, and children accounted for 3,446 victims, or 82.5 percent of the total.

What constitutes a lynching? Although most people think only of hanging, lynching means much more. Lynching is the killing of African Americans who were tortured, mutilated, burned, shot, dragged, or hung; accused of an alleged crime by a white mob; and deprived of their life without due process and equal protection of the law.

This type of mob violence in America earned its nickname in the 1770s from Virginia Quaker Charles Lynch, who authorized extralegal whippings against Tories who harassed patriots and committed crimes during the American Revolution. The practice quickly expanded across the western frontier in the decades before the Civil War, where many of the victims were mostly white, along with a number of Native Americans, Mexicans,Asians, and African Americans. In the antebellum south, whites constituted the majority of victims of mob violence. By the late 19th century, however, lynching had become an almost exclusively southern phenomenon. During the postbellum and Reconstruction periods, mob violence in the south became a tool for maintaining the racial order. African American men, women, and children now composed the majority of victims of lynch violence, and the lynchings assumed an increasingly sadistic nature. African American men, however, were the most targeted.

In southern law, politics, and the economy, the racial hierarchy placed African Americans at the bottom and whites at the top. Many whites believed African Americans had a dual nature--"docile and amiable when enslaved, ferocious and murderous when free[d]."Senator Benjamin (Ben) R. Tillman of South Carolina proclaimed that the African American man was "a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour." Many southern whites had an acute anxiety over racial purity, and they feared the amalgamation of the two races.The "cry of rape" was used as an excuse to lynch the alleged African American rapists for the protection of southern white women. Accusations of rape, however, accounted for only onethird of the lynchings.

In the 1890s, the number of African American men lynched escalated dramatically, as did the brutal torture of the victims' bodies.White mob violence often occurred in areas experiencing economic changes, and lynchings tended to occur where another lynching had already taken place.These acts of violence were directed against the entire African American community and not just a single alleged miscreant. An African American man never knew if he would be the next victim.

Postmaster Frazier Baker, like many other African American lynched victims, was not accused of or guilty of rape but had become a target solely on the basis of his race and for serving in a prominent position reserved in past decades for whites.

Baker was a former farmer and treasurer of the Colored Farmer's Alliance in Florence County, South Carolina, and became a postmaster of the Effingham post office in that county on March 15, 1892. He held this position at least until November 1894.Records show that he became postmaster at Lake City in Williamsburg County, South Carolina, on July 30, 1897, upon the recommendation of Edmund H. Deas, a Republican African American deputy collector of internal revenue also known as the "Duke of Darlington." On February 23, 1898, the Charleston News and Courier described Lake City as "a white man's town, not over a dozen negroes living in the place, and not one

Opposite: Ida B.Wells-Barnett (left) had campaigned for federal help to fight racial violence since the early 1890s. Enraged by the lynching of Frazier Baker in February 1898, she wrote a letter to former Republican Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts (right) concerning a manuscript she had left for the President in which she urged medical and financial aid for Mrs. Baker and her surviving children.

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owning a foot of land in the corporate limits of the town." Consequently, the white residents were perplexed when an African American was appointed postmaster. Lake City residents, like those in many other southern white communities at the time, resented African Americans who sought equality through political arenas, organizations, and jobs.

As a result, Baker encountered opposition immediately from the"good people"of Lake City. One night when he left the post office with some friends, Baker was shot at from an ambush; on another day, someone fired shots into the post office.When Baker assumed his position as postmaster, he made some major changes that angered the white residents. First, he moved the post office from its location of the last six years to a log house about a mile away from town. Next, he changed the three mail deliveries to one a day. Then, after a mysterious fire burned the post office down, Baker did not receive or deliver mail for about a week. The residents accused Baker of administrative ignorance and incompetence, and they protested in a letter to the Lake City Times that was reprinted in the Charleston News and Courier on February 12, 1898:"We have little courtesy shown us and the service is as poor as can be.The negro is uncivil, ignorant and lazy." A petition for Baker's immediate removal, signed by 200 of Lake City's "best people," was sent to the assistant postmaster general in Washington, D.C.:

An 1889 Post Office map shows the South Carolina towns (highlighted here) in which Frazier Baker lived and worked: Effingham and Lake City, Williamsburg County, where he was killed on February 22, 1898, and Cartersville, to which his wife, Lavinia, returned in 1942. Above: A Post Office Department entry shows his appointment as postmaster in Lake City on July 30, 1897.

South Carolina

We, the undersigned citizens of Lake City, S.C., do hereby respectfully request that you have Frazier B. Baker, our postmaster, removed, for the following reasons, to wit: First. He is impolite to ladies. Second. He is incompetent from the fact that he has delivered registered mail without taking receipt for same. Has issued money orders without charging any fee, and he had also given out the advise instead of the money order. Third. He has time and again allowed letters of importance to remain in the office for a week and sometimes a month, notwithstanding the fact that they were being called daily. Fourth.

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He frequently gives out mail to persons that is addressed to persons other than themselves, thereby causing the mail thus given out to be considerably delayed. Fifth. He has sold fifty 2-cent stamps for fifty cents. Sixth. He was not a resident of this county when he applied for this office and had resided here only a few days when he received his commissions."

Two separate investigations by federal post office inspectors produced no evidence to substantiate the residents' claims. Regrettably, though, some 300 or more white residents took the matter into their own hands.

Around 1 a.m. on February 22, the Baker family awoke to discover that a fire had been deliberately set to the back of their home, where the local post office was located. Baker and his daughter Julia were shot to death, and their bodies were left to cremate. Baker's wife, Lavinia, and daughters Rosa and Cora were each shot through the arm, and his son, Lincoln, was shot in the arm and in the stomach. As the family tried to flee from their burning home, a white mob fired upon them. Lavinia described the horrible scene in the Charleston News and Courier interview the following day:

Last night we retired between 10 and 11 o'clock. About 1 o'clock I awoke and found that the building was on fire and that the fire was making rapid progress.Then I aroused my husband. He jumped up and by the time several shots were fired into the building. I took my baby [Julia] into my arms, called the other children and followed Baker, who was making for the door. He reached the door, stuck his head out and was instantly shot several times in the body and through the head. He groaned, reeled and fell back in the building, near the door. Almost at the same time I myself was

shot in the left arm,on which my baby was resting, and not being able to support the child any longer, I dropped it. I noticed, however that it had already been killed. After remaining there a few minutes . . . the other children and myself fled to the house of my neighbor for protection.We got there alive, but three of my [remaining] five children and myself are wounded.

When news of the atrocity spread, outraged citizens wrote to the President,members of Congress, and the Department of Justice demanding federal help to fight racial violence.Ida B.Wells-Barnett was one of them. She was known as the mother of the antilynching movement and had begun a lifelong crusade against lynching after three of her friends were killed in 1892 in Memphis, Tennessee. Up to that point, as she later reflected in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, she, like many others who read in newspapers about lynchings in the south, "accepted the idea . . . that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching." She further accepted the reasoning that "perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life." After the lynching of her friends, Wells-Barnett devoted herself to investigating white racial violence and disproving the rape arguments that were used to justify lynching. No one had accused her friends of any sexual crime. Their only real crime, she concluded, was that the economic success of their grocery store rivaled a white grocer in the same district.

After the Frazier murders, Wells-Barnett immediately expressed her frustrations to government officials. In a undated twopage letter to former Republican Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, she urged President William McKinley to make a recommendation to Congress regarding a manuscript (most likely referencing the

lynching of the postmaster and his daughter) she had left with the former senator. She asked for support for the injured widow and her children, who required medical and financial aid as well as food, shelter, and clothing.

A second undated letter written to the President, which was later forwarded to the Department of Justice for further investigation, still petitioned in behalf of Mrs. Baker and her children.This time she also addressed the issue of the federal government's involvement in fighting Spanish oppression in Cuba while ignoring the oppression of Americans, especially African American victims of lynch mobs. An African American editor for the Lexington (Kentucky) Standard wrote that if to "Remember the Maine [was] the white man's watch-word, [then] remembering the murder of postmaster Baker . . . should be the Negro's." Wells-Barnett agreed and wrote:

For nearly two years the overwhelming sentiment of the American people has demanded that even at the risk of provoking war, this nation interfere with the political policy of a friendly nation. We defend ourselves by declaring against barbarism of Spanish oppression. Strange that this sentiment so exercised over barbarism in Cuba should rest so complaisant over barbarism at home. During the past fifteen years more than 2500 men, women, and children have been put to death through lynchings, hangings, shooting, drowning and burning alive. All this in our own land under our own flag and yet our government has not taken the first step to stop the slaughter. Your Memoralists therefore respectfully suggest Justice like Charity should begin at home.

Wells-Barnett appealed on behalf of the Ida B. Wells Woman's Club of Chicago, Illinois, for the President to apprehend and punish those responsible for the shooting and "recommend a national enactment to protect, men, women and children from the awful epidemic of mob law." They

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News of the atrocity against Frazier Baker and his family was widely reported. An artist's depiction appeared in the Boston Post on August 10, 1899, soon after his widow relocated there.

During the investigation in April 1898, U.S. attorney Abial Lathrop reported to the Attorney General that the "whole community is absolutely terrorized," and that in spite of his offers of immunity from prosecution, it would be essential to offer protection to witnesses.

Left: Wells and her Woman's Club formally petitioned Congress in behalf of Baker's widow and surviving children on March 3, 1898, urging federal action and protection. Right: Report No. 1379 to the 55th Congress, 2nd session, dated May 19, 1898, contains the Postmaster General's report recommending that H. Res. 171 be passed to provide compensation to Baker's widow.

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